How to design an emotional online shopping experience?
To create an emotional experience on your website, you have to give your customers an environment in which they can discover, collaborate and then transact. For this, you need to know the emotional ‘triggers’ relevant to your brand and include them in your marketing material and shopping experience.
Start out with emotional research. Study and run a thorough analysis of the demographics and psychographics of your brand. You have to know things, such as: the taste of your customers, their interests, their likes and dislikes, pain etc. And also identify what are the things that elicit an emotional response from your customers. Go ahead create mood pinboards of images that can create that emotional experience; it can be simple things such as — bright colors, rain, love, flowers, morning sunshine, water, art, kids, women, architecture, mountains, lakes etc. To collect all this data, you can use instruments such as: quiz, customer reviews, contests, customer return feedback, general feedback, chat sessions, vendor feedback forms etc.
But don’t Over-engineer
Data can be wisely used to create a convenient shopping experience and even know their emotional triggers but don’t over-engineer your website’s shopping experience. Once you have all the emotional intelligence about your customers, you need people who have the ability to use that intelligence with their natural creativity to create a romance around your website’s online shopping experience.
You might have to take the role similar to a film director, wherein he controls a film’s artistic and dramatic aspects, and visualizes the script while guiding the technical crew and actors to make us laugh, cry or scream in terror.
Here are some of the human emotions that you can use while designing the emotional aspect of your website’s shopping experience:
- Intrigue and mystery — Use these emotions in your marketing material
If you can create marketing material (facebook ads, emails, etc) which elicits a feeling of intrigue and mystery in your potential customers, not only these emotions improve your ‘Click through rate’ but also make people who land on your online store curious to explore and be receptive to the messages and stories you have to tell them on your website.
- Desire and aspiration — Use these emotions in your website content
Once a user lands on your website, your content (UI, banners, product images, lookbook images) should create a feeling of desire and aspiration in your customers to be part of something larger than the brand and products which can be a certain lifestyle, idea, community, taste, motivation etc.
- Urgency and fear — Use these emotions in your call to actions
The call to action text, links and images on your website should trigger the emotions of urgency (and even fear) in your customers to provoke a fear of missing out an opportunity. Evoking these emotions can help you keep your cart abandonment rate in check.
- Trust & Comfort— Use these emotions on about, contact pages
Like we said, your customers want to know what’s behind the promise. Who’re the people running the show? What is their story? Can they be trusted? How do they look? Where are they coming from? Your content on the about and contact pages should answer all these questions so that you can generate a feeling of trust and be transparent with your customers.
- Surprise and laughter — Use these emotions on social
Everyone wants to be happy and make others feel the same. If you can create marketing material that surprises people and make them laugh, you can ensure that people will not only have a positive outlook about your brand but also share, like and engage with your brand on social media.
This is obviously not an exhaustive list of human emotions. There are endless ways how you can use human emotions to not only improve your website’s conversion rate but to also ensure the long-term success of your online brand.
We’re living in a time when easy search and smooth checkout processes are not enough to make your customers buy. You have to create emotional paths for your customers on your website to not only make them complete the transaction but to also connect with them at a very emotional level. And that’s what will make them feel like buying from you. What do you think?
